Terrible Swift Sword Read Online Free

Company trading center for the upper Oregon Territory.
    Indians had massacred seventeen white settlers at the Cascades of the Columbia, midway between the fort and the Dalles’s churning rapids. The survivors had taken refuge in the old military blockhouse at the Middle Cascades.
    Nearly all of the Washington Indian tribes, angry over white encroachments on their lands, were on the warpath. Men, women, and children had been murdered in their cabins and settlements.
    The previous fall, tribal leaders had ceded the lands and agreed to move to reservations. Under the agreement, whites could not move into the areas until Congress had ratified the treaty. However, the settlers and gold prospectors had not waited. Washington Territory’s governor, Isaac Stevens, had encouraged the flouting of the treaty, declaring the lands open for immediate settlement. When gold was discovered in the Colville mines during the summer of 1855, the rush was on.
    As so often happened in the collision of the white and Indian cultures, the tribal leaders had signed the 1855 treaty without their people’s consent, during secret negotiations with Washington Territory leaders. When the tribal members learned about the treaty, they rejected it and warned that there would be a war if whites encroached on their lands.
    The Indians killed six miners bound for the Colville goldfields and murdered the Indian agent sent to investigate the deaths. Under a flag of truce, militiamen seized Walla Walla chief Pio Pio Mox Mox, shot him when he tried to escape, scalped him, and cut off his ears. The Walla Wallas, Yakimas, Cayuses, and Umatillas—as well as members of other Washington tribes—donned blue paint and went on the warpath. 16
    The commander of the US Army’s Northwest Department, Major General John Wool, whose service dated to the War of 1812 and who had led an expedition during the recent Mexican War, blamed the Washington and Oregon territorial governors for starting a war “to promote their own ambitious schemes.” Now, he disgustedly observed, they wanted the army to win the war for them. 17
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    THE WIRY, COMPACT SHERIDAN had been on duty in the Pacific Northwest for just seven months. Upon being reassigned to the 4th US Infantry in California,
Sheridan had traveled to New York, where he temporarily commanded a detachment of three hundred recruits at the army fort on Bedloe’s Island before sailing to San Francisco, crossing the Isthmus of Panama in suffocating July heat.
    At Fort Reading, California, he was ordered to catch up with an army expedition that had left four days earlier to survey a railroad route between the Sacramento Valley and the Columbia River in the Oregon Territory. He relieved Lieutenant John Bell Hood, a Class of 1853 classmate and future adversary, and assumed command of the expedition leader’s mounted escort. The expedition’s quartermaster was Lieutenant George Crook, a friend and former West Point roommate. 18
    When the expedition reached the Columbia River, Sheridan was assigned to Major Gabriel Rains’s expedition against the Yakima Indians; they had killed their Indian agent and repulsed a punitive expedition under Major Granville Haller.
    Rains’s column, consisting of a small detachment of regulars and Oregon mounted volunteers, did no better. After trailing six hundred Yakima to a ridge, where the Indians taunted the soldiers and made lewd gestures, Sheridan proposed that he lead his dragoons into a canyon behind them while Rains charged the hill with his infantry, trapping the Indians between them—a strategy Sheridan would employ over the years with success.
    But the hypercautious Rains rejected the plan, and the Indians continued to mock the soldiers before disappearing into the mountains. After the troopers foundered in the deep snow in futile pursuit, the expedition ended without achieving any of its objectives. Sheridan fumed over Rains’s